BitterTwisted
by jjbird
Summary: Samantha, Jack, a late night phone call. One shot. Set end of S4.


**Bitter/Twisted**

**By jjbird**

**New A/N ****April 2010:** -I just changed the final line in this, several years after I wrote it as I didn't like it as it had been a spur of the moment thing. I still feel the same as I did about the whole Jack/Anne debacle, then we had the whole Sam/ONS nonsense and then the writers gave us a crappy ending to J/S on WAT, and _then_ CBS/Warner Brothers pulled the plug without any hope of a season 8 to put it all right. Still, we have our fanfic, and there are still a lot of good writers out there.

**Original A/N:** This really needed to be written, you'll understand why... Thanks to the wonderful Mariel for her beta skills (only a small tweak since then). And to all my fellow J/S fans -it's hard to keep the faith, but we can do it!

**Disclaimer:** Trust me, I don't own WAT or the characters, because if I did we would have seen a hell of a better Season 4 than we did...

* * *

Samantha rolled off the bed to answer the ringing phone. Rubbing her eyes and wiping her tear-stained cheeks dry, she wondered what the time was as she wearily picked up the phone.

"Sam, it's me –Jack."

Like he needed to identify himself.

Walking back to her bedroom, Samantha hid her surprise. She sat heavily back on the bed. He'd only called her if it was work related these days; he certainly never called her on her home line. "What's up?"

As if she couldn't guess.

"Uh, just wanted to talk," he said, and then she heard what sounded like him taking a sip from a glass, ice chinking. Probably hitting the whisky, and after all the drama at the office today, she wouldn't have blamed him.

"So, pregnant, huh?" she threw at him, as she lay back down in the darkness.

"Yeah," he said, in a resigned voice.

As if she didn't know -like the whole goddamn office didn't know. He might as well punched her in the guts himself when she'd gotten that piece of news.

"What do you want, Jack?"

She heard him take another swig, and wondered how much he'd been drinking. Quite a bit probably, enough to make him call her at home, this late at night.

"It's all too much for me Sam, I don't know if I can handle this, not these days, not now."

"Well, you should have thought of that before you started playing sexual Russian roulette with her."

"Sam-"

"For Christ's sake, at your age you should know better than that!"

He was silent and Samantha was glad she'd got that off her chest. The pause continued.

"Where's Anne?" she finally asked.

"Asleep, she's pretty worn out. One minute she's all good about this pregnancy thing, the next she's down."

Samantha doubted it had anything to do with hormones.

"So, why are you calling me after all this time, Jack? Unless it's work, you've barely spoken to me for months." _Or looked at me, or smiled at me…_

"I haven't forgotten you, Sam," he said quietly.

"Could have fooled me."

"I just don't know how this all happened the way it did. Things just got away from me, I guess…"

Samantha let a sad smile pass her lips. _He got that right._

"This is pointless –you're with Anne, you're having a baby, you don't need to talk to me."

"I… still think of you… being with you…"

_Jesus Christ, he must be incredibly drunk to tell me that._ "And how am I supposed to feel about that, Jack? I had been hoping that after Maria left that we'd…" She took a deep breath. She needed to get something else off her chest; it had been gnawing at her for a while. "And then you hook up with some Maria clone before her husband's even cool in his grave. Everyone noticed it, Jack."

She could hear him breathing and drinking, so she waited.

"I've been so lonely and she was there-"

"Fuck you Jack. I've been there. I've always been there, one way or another."

"You were with Martin."

"Only really because you went off to Chicago… And I sure regret it now."

She could almost hear him digesting her words. "So, when I stayed…"

"You could have been with me." _You only had to ask…_

He seemed to take stock of that, and then he must have been in some kind of alcohol-induced daze: "Sometimes… sometimes when I'm in bed with her, I think it's you, that I'm touching you…"

It was Samantha's turn to be silent. Several cutting, sarcastic comments went through her mind.

"Sam?"

"How the hell am I supposed to react to that?"

"I don't know… But God help me, it's true. Does that-" She heard him take a large gulp of whisky, making his voice sound smoky when he next spoke. "Does that make a difference?"

"Difference to what -does it actually matter, Jack? Do you really care? Tomorrow, you'll be sober, still with Anne and still a father-to-be. We'll just go on the same, as though nothing ever happened." _Like the last God knows how many months..._

Jack sighed deeply. "I was torn between you and Maria; now you and Anne."

_Oh Jack, why do you do this to me?_ Stunned that she was still so much on his mind, she fought to gain some self-control, throwing her arm across her eyes as the tears threatened to come. "Thanks for that information, I feel so much better," she said bitterly.

"Sam, I mean it when I say I miss-" There was a pause, and some muffled sounds coming from Jack's end, as though he was covering the mouthpiece.

Then he was back on the line, his voice changed to a more formal and almost regretful tone. "I'm sorry, I've got to go."

Samantha put two and two together. "She heard you, didn't she…?"

"Yeah… Bye." He hung up.

She stared at the receiver in her hand, and then disconnected her line.

The tears finally came. Great sobbing tears into her pillow. So bad, she was getting a headache.

What was it with Jack these days? It wasn't making any sense. He was finally being honest about where he was coming from, but to suddenly bring it up out of the blue like that…

But this whole pregnancy thing was the last straw.

Suffering through those damn ties Anne kept giving him, staring her in the face every time she faced him, had been bad enough –like some great possessive territorial marker.

Stupid woman.

He'd taken his ring off. Samantha had nearly died when she'd noticed.

There wasn't anything she could do about it.

Any of it.

Like some drawn out torture, it wasn't going to finish.

It was just going to get worse.

And she couldn't have Jack dropping any more bombshells, so it was time to do what she should have done some time ago.

Something she'd never wanted to do because she'd always wanted to be with Jack, but being near him in recent times only caused her deep pain and terrible heartache.

Time to just give him up.

Xx--


End file.
